I’m findable at online readings, conventions, and open mics and available for more at the drop of a … microphone. (See my Appearances page!) Here’s what I’ve been squee-ing about lately. Yes, I know, Octocon’s over, but I can’t resist sharing this cute view with Octo in their Wonder Woman outfit. In my Twitter feed this week, I’m sharing links to the videos of my panels, which are all live on Twitch right now and will be on YouTube forever … or until people get tired of them.
In December, I’ll be (virtually) on-site at the World Science Fiction Convention, DisCon III. I’ll be roving the virtual halls and hanging out in the dealers room. Water Dragon Publishing is planning lots of special activities there, like we had at Readercon in August! See you there!
Octocon is Coming!
On October 1-3rd, I’ll be part of the the Irish National Science Fiction Convention, Octocon. It’s free, online, and international! The programme has just been finalized. I’m moderating two panels, participating in another, and will also be taking part in a Very Silly Event. Click the super-secret button below to find my panels—and connect to the full programme.
In some critique circles, shooting down misplaced modifiers has become a sporting activity. It’s fun, because they’re easy to spot and can be really funny. “The robber drove the getaway car in a batman costume” should make you smile at the image of a car cosplaying as The Batman. It’s logical that a modifier works best when it’s placed as close as possible to the thing it’s describing. For example, the descriptor “in a batman costume” should be next to “robber” and not “car.”
Unfortunately, a valuable writing tool—the participial phrase—is taking collateral damage.
An 1899 postcard by Jean-Marc Côté (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
A participial phrase is a specialized modifier that conveys movement or change, often incorporating visual imagery and other details, while performing the duties of an adjective. This tool has its own grammar and punctuation rules. Like any modifier, it can be misplaced, but the writer has flexibility in its placement, supported by the unsung hero of grammar: the comma.
To be sure we’re all on the same page, let’s start with participles. A participle is what you get when you take a verb and use it as an adjective: drowned trees, running water, flying pigs, grown woman, billowing clouds. Look for the past- and present-tense endings.
A simple participle works just like an ordinary adjective and is placed exactly as you would expect. For example, “drowned trees” could be a more dramatic way to say “dead trees.” It’s not unique to English, but repurposing words is relatively common in our language. Apparently, we English-speakers are determined to keep turning one part of speech into another, as if we haven’t got enough words already. Verbing nouns is one of my pet peeves.
(Yes, I know. You saw what I did there.)
A participial phrase is both
a phrase with a participle in it, and
a phrase acting as an adjective, intended to describe the subject of a sentence.
For example, “acting as an adjective” is a participial phrase. So is, “intended to describe the subject of a sentence.”
To get a participial phrase, you build upon the participle:
Trees … drowned in the flood from the broken dam
Water … running over rocks and rills
Pigs … flying like eagles
Woman … grown wise in the ways of the world
Clouds … billowing like windblown sheets of satin (note the participle within this participial phrase)
Participles and participial phrases add flavor and texture to our sentences, and because they come from verbs, they help create a feeling of action. Questions arise when we go to put our nicely-constructed phrase into its sentence, because … where do we put the darned thing? You have three choices:
Leading: Billowing like windblown sheets of satin, the clouds sailed over the plains of Endor.
Subject-adjacent: The clouds, billowing like windblown sheets of satin, sailed over the plains of Endor.
Trailing: The clouds sailed over the plains of Endor, billowing like windblown sheets of satin.
(Note: these are my own terms. Reliable texts will say “at the beginning/in the middle/at the end.” yawn. Also, do not rail at me about the forests of Endor. This one is about the plains. Where, possibly, it rains. Like in Spain.)
Now … wait for it … here it comes:
If (and only if) you fail to properly punctuate a participial phrase, it becomes a misplaced modifier.
Technically, it’s a mispunctuated modifier, but to the reader, it’s confusing, and that’s why we care about misplaced modifiers. It occurs most often when the participial phrase is trailing. The separating comma before the phrase signals the reader that what follows describes the subject, in our example: clouds. Without the comma, you get:
The clouds sailed over the plains of Endor billowing like windblown sheets of satin.
Here, the reader is cast adrift and must grab for the nearest noun. While it may be possible that the plains of Endor billow, without other information, the reader will snicker, backtrack, guess what you mean, and move on, now somewhat annoyed by your absent comma.
Participial phrases bow to the humble comma or risk being misunderstood. For leading ones, you need a comma to close off the modifying phrase and move into the sentence proper. For subject-adjacent placement, commas—or their absence—are used intentionally to create subtle distinctions in meaning, distinguishing between essential description and nonessential elaboration.
A participial phrase placed next to the subject but without commas makes that descriptor an essential one. Consider:
The clouds billowing like windblown sheets of satin sailed over the plains of Endor.
Here the phrase is “essential” because it’s telling us that only those clouds that are billowing (yes, like satin) sail over the plains. Perhaps other clouds lie high in the stratosphere, unaffected by the winds below. If we put the commas back in, then we know the descriptor is colorful but nonessential. That is, we understand that all the clouds are sailing, though we pause in the middle of the sentence to enjoy the charming detail of their movement and sheen.
Placement at the beginning versus the end of a sentence allows us to create a sense of sequence, the order in which the storyteller wants the reader to experience each element. With the leading version of our Endorian sentence, the author wants you to take in the image of the shape and movement and texture of the clouds first, then imagine them sailing over the plains. It’s like when a child runs up to you with a remote-control toy and says “Look! Godzilla is driving this robot car! Isn’t it cool? Now watch what it can do!”
In contrast, with a trailing placement, the author nudges you to first realize that the clouds are sailing over the plains—maybe it’s important, because a party of adventurers must cross the stormy plain—and then lets you enjoy the clouds’ beauty. In our child’s-play example, first you are startled by a remote-control car zipping across the playground, and then a child is calling out “Wow! Cool! A robot car with Godzilla driving it!”
And now, don’t you want a robot car?
Me, too!
Were the plains of Endor too much? Let’s review, using a simpler situation. Imagine a romance in which a young woman has just learned her true love is about to sail away on a ship, and she’s hurried to the docks. She spots him boarding a vessel, but it’s way down on the pier. She has to run. She wants him to see her, but he’s too far away.
Here’s a mispunctuated participial phrase: Mun-Su ran down the dock waving to her departing lover.
We know the dock isn’t saying farewell to its lover, we know it’s Mun-Su, but as readers we don’t like to have to stop and think about it. Add the comma demanded by a trailing participial phrase, and all becomes clear as we yank out our hankies: Mun-Su ran down the dock, waving to her departing lover.
Of course, you could stick the participial phrase at the front: Waving to her departing lover, Mun-Su ran down the dock. Grammatically, this is correct, but we’ve defined a situation in which Mun-Su needs to get a move on first; her running is the critical action, because the lover won’t see her waving until she gets closer.
Further, what if you want to make the situation more complex? This is an important beat in the story. Surely, you want to share the character’s innermost feelings, her physical sensations at that moment: Her heart hammered like a steam piston as Mun-Su ran down the dock, waving to her departing lover.
Those unaware of the functionality of the participial phrase will point and cry, “You must place the phrase next to the subject.” Oh, my, but then you get: Her heart hammered like a steam piston as Mun-Su, waving to her departing lover, ran down the dock.
Poor Mun-Su is awkwardly waving, in a nonessential way, as she runs down the dock. Sadly, I’m not seeing a happily-ever-after now. Pass me the tissues.
I do hope you have enjoyed this little missive from the Grammar Police. We protect and serve … the text.
Long, long ago, when I was a horse-mad thirteen-year-old, we lived stranded in a one-street suburb of Montgomery, Alabama, where the only available equine companionship came in the form of a mare and foal pastured behind our house. The mare was tolerant, not friendly, but not the type to pitch a fit when some kid squeezed through the barbed-wire fence to pamper her baby. It helped that the colt wasn’t a baby anymore, to be sure.
Generally, I would manage to sneak out with an apple, which the young horse would snarf down with relish. Then he would snuffle at my pockets in hopes of seconds. Horses are smarter than non-horsey people give them credit for. Horses know what pockets are for. Pockets are containers for apples, carrots, crunchy horse treats, sometimes even a handful of grain, preferably sweet feed. They do not care about the cries emanating from laundry rooms when mothers find pocket-loads of such goodies swirling in the wash.
One fine February day, I ventured out with only some small treat, nothing as appealing as an apple. It was chilly, so I wore my new(ish) red coat. And my pony friend bit me on the shoulder. Another thing non-horsey people may not know is that a horse can bite hard. They fight with their teeth–stallions even have extra-sharp eye teeth for those battles that make the front covers of old cowboy paperbacks.
That bite hurt. It hurt bad. I was not so horse-crazy that I didn’t run home for help. I was lucky to be wearing that insulated jacket–all my friend gave me was an enormous bruise, as the coat distributed the impact nicely. My mother was angry, scolding me for trespassing in the pasture but also clearly angry that the horse had hurt me. I took his part, explaining–convincingly, I was sure–that he simply mistook the red, rounded curve of my shoulder for a big shiny apple. It was my fault, I told her, for leading him to expect apples all the time and . . . most accurately, for turning my back on him. I loved horses, but I’d been hanging around them since I was six, and I knew better.
Bear with me. I’m getting there.
We were living in Montgomery because my dad was attending the Air War College, an academic-style officer-training program. It’s very like a master’s degree program in strategy, analysis, all that sort of thing. (My copy of Strunk and White is a discard from the library there, one my dad brought home for his aspiring-writer kid.) My mom grew up spending summers on “the farm”–her parent’s country get-away. My dad was a city boy through-and-through. Years later, I learned he was afraid of horses–that the thought of his kid galloping around on top of one of those monsters horrified him.
The War College program is only a year. One spring night, quite late, my parents stumbled into the house after some kind of semi-official party at the AWC. They, or at least Dad, had had a really fun evening. Really, really fun. My dad had received his next posting. As wing commander for a prestigious bomber wing. In North Dakota. We were moving to an air base where there was an on-base stable, in a state where horses were cheap to get and to keep.
“North Dakota is Rough Rider country, cowboy country,” my dad told me that night, his eyes bright and his grin much wider than usual. “So you can have a horse in North Dakota. Won’t that be great?”
When Dad sobered up, the next day, and recovered from his headache, the day after, Mom sat him down and told him what he’d promised me. And she held him to it. She wouldn’t let him back out of it.
So for the next four months, I thought to myself, over and over again, I’m getting a horse, I’m getting a horse, I’m getting a horse.
It’s happening again. I may be ever so much older than twenty now, but I’m having all those same feelings Though it’s not a horse this time. It’s a book. It’s my book. And it’s being published. For reals. For really reals. In four months.
It’s about a couple of strangers who meet up and have some troubles understanding one another.
Cross-species friendships can be complicated.
The book is All That Was Asked. It’s coming out from Paper Angel Press, a publisher based in San Jose, California. And it should be out in January of 2020. In the meantime, check out all the other books that Paper Angel Press has available.
It’s graduation season, and I’m in post-production now after playing the role of Audience Member in three recent productions of Commencement 2014. At UC Berkeley’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Professor Tanya Atwater of UC Santa Barbara provided the keynote address. She was excited to report on her experience as part of the team writing the new science standards. For members of the EPS department, the “good news” is that the new standards specifically include Earth & Space Science as one of four core disciplines. Advocates of coding-in-every-classroom will also be happy that one of the four is “Engineering, Technology, and Applications”, though they may be disappointed to find that coding is not all there is to technology.
However, as Professor Atwater pointed out, this is a creation devised by a committee, and a large one at that. These standards are huge, complex, and demanding. I won’t be surprised if primary teachers throw up their hands and say “Heck, the old Science Framework was complicated enough! We’re going back to literature, thanks a lot.” I had a peek at a few pages–the new standard can be surveyed in an interactively, online. For instance, if you select Grade 1 and Physical Sciences, you are taken to a page entitled Waves and Their Applications in Technologies for Information Transfer
If that’s not enough to send your primary-grade teacher screaming to the arts-and-crafts cupboard, he/she is then presented with a grid of expectations about what first-graders should be able to understand and demonstrate about waves, from sound waves to light waves. I can tell by the “clarifying statements” and all the hyperlinks to definitions for everything from the requirement that students “Make observations to construct an evidence-based account” to explaining that you use “Cause and Effect” to show that when the lights are off you can’t see objects. Well, says the gamer kid, what if I have my night-vision goggles on?
Meanwhile, the teacher is supposed to be tracing all the Common-Core standards links and the cross-discipline values obtained. As an engineer, I find that sort of thing daunting, while I suspect most trained teachers find those elements-links an easy yawn–it’s the demand they convey science skills to kids at what seems to be a very sophisticated level that presents a barrier. Remember, it’s unusual for an elementary-school teacher to enter the field with more than a bare minimum of science or technology training.
Not good news? Well, it may be good news for some students currently graduating in the sciences–the new standards create a market for teachers who have science toolkits ready to hand. And if states are not too heavy-handed in adopting these standards, the NGSS provides tons of leeway in the actual curriculum developed and in both straight-up statements and in the subtext of the descriptive matter the NGSS strongly urges the use of hands-on, experiential learning techniques. That’s good, especially in elementary school, because hands-on activities are the best, overall, at evoking those Aha! moments that make science exciting. What the scientists working on that committee were most excited about was the prospect of bringing that thrill to more students, not only to attract some to actually becoming scientists or engineers but also to allow those following other paths to understand what motivates the ones who do follow the siren song of science.
For example, if you jumped to Professor Atwater’s page, you’d have read her non-committee-developed description of her motivations to teach and her love for science, “In lecture, I used to think I wasn’t a good scientist if I admitted my passion. No more. In the last few years I have adopted a style of expressing my delight along with sharing why I’m delighted – the intricate order and sense (and, sometimes, irony) of how things work – wonderful!”
One of my best experiences during Commencement Week was talking about education with a Kindergarten teacher who was struggling with making sure his (yeah, don’t go sexist on me–men can so teach kindergarten) students each got the attention they needed, despite a class size of more than thirty, in a year when he had no parent volunteers to help out. And though he was looking forward to summer vacation, he was the most interested to hear about some of my “Messy Monday” science experiences. As a result, I’m determined that the next couple of activities I put up here under the “Messy Monday” label will be ones targeted to the K-2 crowd.
So, well, the new science standards, if you can get past the committee-style presentation, could be turned into good news. Let’s get kids doing the kind of science that comes naturally to them: trying things out, making mistakes, watching what happens. Let’s help them break free of seeing what they expect to see–it’s those wow moments of unexpectedness that give doing science that endorphin rush. It’s when the comet is chasing its tail on its way out of the inner Solar System or a water jet sprays farther than you guessed or you suddenly realize that a rainbow isn’t part of a prism or a raincloud or even a soap bubble–it’s the light itself that makes the rainbow.
